So who wants to get weird with David Bowie? You're in luck: 'Blackstar' is here

The weirdest thing about "Blackstar" (or "★"), the unfathomably weird 26th studio album from 69-year-old birthday boy David Bowie, is how instantly appealing and familiar its dark and aberrant matter can be.

With seven tracks ranging in length from long to longer, "Blackstar" — which dropped Friday from Sony Music — is among Bowie's most macabre and ritualistic records, all skittering jazz drums and washes of dark energy, an unsettlingly shifty landscape of outer-space nightmares held together only by the Thin White Duke's pulsing, mournful vibrato itself.

Rippling through it all is the saxophone of Grammy-nominated Donny McCaslin, whose quartet is backing Bowie for the first time. It's David Bowie at his most jazzed-out. And wow, is it something to take in.

Not a single one of these records will make it to the radio. Every track on "Blackstar" ignores the laws of songwriting physics; there are no verse-chorus verse-chorus structures or discernible, major-key hooks here.

But there is something deeply irresistible about it, in pieces and as a whole.

McCaslin's sax grounds much of the cosmic stew with just enough of a "Let's Dance" vibe, the best use of sax-solo nostalgia since M83's unlikely, still-in-rotation hit "Midnight City." Bowie's melodies — if you can call them that — often veer into a wall of shimmering bombast, like you're meeting some superior astral being announcing its arrival with a blast of sound, Close Encounters of a Third Kind-style.

Working with wizard-level jazz fusion artists at times has Bowie operating at Radiohead-level twisted, both lyrically and sonically — and yet drummer Mark Guiliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre and keyboardist Jason Lindner assert an immediacy that recalls the extravagant, handmade production values of Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories."

Bowie is certainly operating at that level. His vocal skills are in no way diminished; in fact, his undulating lines just get more elastic with age, wise and time-worn around the edges, the perfect tone for an inter-dimensional death-jazz freakout record you didn't know you wanted this much.

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